RECOVERY: Heckling from the Hill

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Heckling from the Hill When Congress is not in session its voice cannot be heard. When its voice cannot be heard it might as well not exist. Hence General Johnson, whose NRA did not begin teething until after Congress adjourned last June, was troubled for months by the complaints of old guard businessmen, but not by the caterwauling of Congressmen. To be sure. Senators Borah and Nye wrote him protesting that NRA was driving small businesses to the wall and turning trusts loose on a career of price fixing. To be sure, they appealed to the President and were given to understand that the Federal Trade Commission might be given power to protect small businessmen, to restore some of the teeth in the anti-trust laws. To be sure, the Trade Commission at General Johnson's invitation sent a man to watch the code making. But nothing happened. So last week, with Congress solidly in session again, Messrs. Borah and Nye went forth to battle on the Senate floor.

Senator Borah offered an amendment to the Recovery Act ending the suspension of the anti-trust laws. Said he: "I do not think there can be any compensation for unjust prices charged to the public. I do not think there can be any compensation for the destruction of small business. ... I do not believe it is possible to protect [the small businessman] so long as we permit these combinations in restraint of trade, so long as we permit the great combines to fix prices. . . ."

Senator Nye used warmer language: "If what seems to have been the policy of NRA is continued the plunderers may well adopt 'The Last Round-Up' as their theme song and trample under heel whatever remains of independent business and make the consumer a mere slave. . . ."

Not a Senator spoke up to defend NRA, but conservative Democrat Glass and radical Democrat Costigan both chimed in on the critical chorus.

That same afternoon General Johnson flew up to Manhattan, dined with National Retail Dry Goods Association, and gave them a Johnsonian earful by way of reply: "Generally speaking the dead cats are fewer in number and have lost some of their ripeness and velocity. . . . But a storm is brewing. . . . There will be a distinct movement to repeal this act under this slogan of 'oppression of small enterprise.' It won't be a forthright open movement for repeal. These gentlemen do not dare do that. Some of this will be done by a Senator whom I love for his intestinal fortitude perhaps more than any Senator other than Carter Glass. . . . It will be an attempt to put in the act about three lines forbidding action by any industry in unison and in effect substituting the Federal Trade Commission for the NRA.

"There was—and there is—about as much cooperation between the Federal Trade Commission and industry as there is between a lion-tamer with a blacksnake whip, a revolver and a strong-backed chair standing in a cage with six jungle cats snapping and snarling on six star-spangled hassocks—that is their version of economic planning. . . . Yet that is the condition these economic genii want to restore. . . . These men have really nothing to support them but the width of their mouths and the volumetric capacity of their lung power. . . . The fact is that they do not know what they want and men in that condition ought not to speak at all. . . .